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Which reminded me: I had been meaning to write about Jeff McCord’s sequel to Sword of Fargoal, but a combination of deadlines and the onset of a family-wide stomach flu had made mincemeat of my October plans.

Now, with the chaos back at manageable levels, it was time to start making up for lost time.

So I hopped over to the Kickstarter page.

Sword of Fargoal 2 is the sequel to the 25 year old Commodore 64 “roguelike” game that saw a revival in 2009 when it was remade for the iPhone.

Roguelikes are the original dungeon-crawlers, and Sword of Fargoal is just about as old-school as you can get – a highly addictive and extremely challenging 2D game that you can now get for $1.99 on iOS devices.

The Sword of Fargoal team had set their funding goal at $50,000.

On Kickstarter, if a project doesn’t fund every last penny then it doesn’t fund at all. Whatever money backers of the project pledged simply vanishes.

When I arrived at the Kickstarter page, I was surprised to see only 90 minutes remained on the ticker.

Worse, the project was nearly $10,000 short – 20% of the entire funding drive left to go, with less than two hours remaining.

I wrote a post at the time to let people know that this was their last chance to back the project (to which some of my readers rightfully pointed out that a bit more of a warning would have been nice.)

Post published, I checked the clock again. The time was ticking, and there was still a long ways to go.

A little over an hour later I discovered – to my surprise – that Sword of Fargoal 2 had fully funded.

As some readers pointed out at the time, it seemed almost too good to be true.

Of course, sometimes that phrase - too good to be true - is the result of an innate penchant toward cynicism.

Too often we hear stories that make us doubt the goodness of our human nature. Too often reading or writing about the video game industry these days feels like wading into a discussion of politics.

But sometimes we hear stories that make us smile, and the eleventh hour success of Sword of Fargoal 2 is one of those stories.

Jeff McCord emailed me later Saturday to thank me for posting about his project. I doubt it did much good, honestly, but it was nice to hear about the enormous outpouring of support the project received in its last few hours.

It turned out that Obsidian Entertainment CEO Feargus Urquhart had shown up as a surprise guest on McCord’s 24-hour Kick-a-thon earlier that day and “near the end he hinted that they (Obsidian) had a surprise for us that they thought might help out,” Jeff told me.

You can watch that conversation below. McCord and Urquhart talk a lot about Obsidian’s Project Eternity and other Kickstarter projects as well:

“Sure enough,” Jeff told me, “busy with the webcast and thanking people at the end, it finally dawned on me that about eighteen individual/personal pledges of varying amounts (from personal email addresses) had flooded in within the last hour or two.”

This is where things take an interesting twist.

“Turns out, there was one thing in common: Each of the individuals had the word “Obsidian” in their clever job title. Even in my foggy, sleep-deprived state, Feargus had probably “rallied the troops” at Obsidian to make their own personal support pledges to our campaign! Is that a CLASS ACT or what!!?”

Class act indeed. In a world driven by competition, you don’t often hear stories about different firms in the same business lending one another a helping hand.

It’s one of those rare, inexplicable phenomenons that seems almost out of place in an economy that’s so driven by the concept of winners and losers. And it’s one reason that Kickstarter has inspired such a flood of positive emotion and support from gamers and developers alike.

“I remember Sword of Fargoal fondly from my early days of gaming on the Commodore 64 and it was great to see Jeff using Kickstarter to help out with Sword of Fargoal 2,” Feargus Urquhart told me when I asked for his take on the project’s last-minute success.

“I had been watching the progress and was really rooting for them to succeed. On the last day of their campaign, it was very nice to get invited by Jeff to participate in his Kick-a-thon and I had been thinking about how to help a bit more. I noticed that the backers on Project Eternity had been talking about Sword of Fargoal and me being on the Kick-a-thon. My thought was to help that momentum, by backing and then announcing that backing right after the end of my Kick-a-thon segment to tie it all together. I don’t know if that helped them push things over the top, but whatever it did do – I was very glad to help.”

With $10,000 flooding in during the last two hours, and the project only leaping the last hurdle in the final two minutes of the drive, Obsidian’s efforts were almost certainly what tipped the scales.

But Obsidian wasn’t the only game developer that made the Kickstarter a success.

Kevin Hill of ChronoSoft also played a key roll, giving out promo codes for his game Rogue Touch to last minute backers, showing up on McCord’s Kick-a-thon, and donating to the project.

The remarkable thing about Hill’s contribution is that Rogue Touch is another iOS roguelike game – a direct competitor, in other words, with Sword of Fargoal, in a genre not exactly brimming over with titles.

Here’s the “photo finish” video showing the last tense minutes of the campaign. The words “nail-biter” come up a couple times. There’s probably no better description than that.

Watching the video I couldn’t help but smile.

Just a few dollars in the other direction and all that relief and excitement at the end would have been replaced with crushing disappointment.

With the Kick-it-Forward campaign we’ve already seen how developers are working to support one another, but this last minute push to make Sword of Fargoal 2 a reality is truly a one-of-a-kind story.

As indie developer Jelly Paladin said on the Kickstarter page shortly after the game crossed the finish line, “no number of millions of dollars poured into producing video games has produced a blockbuster AAA title that ever felt as tense and dramatic as watching Sword of Fargoal 2 claw its way to $50,000 with the last-minute assist from Obsidian.”

You can read the Sword of Fargoal 2 thank-you note and watch the thank-you video here.

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Oh absolutely it changes the nature of competition. I still think it’s neat to see ChronoSoft backing Fargoal, though, since they do directly compete. But no, I don’t mean to suggest Obsidian is somehow in direct competition with Fargoal.

I think everyone wants to see these types of games come back, competing studio or not. Having more exposure and introducing a genre to a new audience by giving them a variety of games to choose from in the coming years can only benefit the entire lot of developer studios itching to break into the crowd and self funded digital game publishing business. These games are less competitors to each other and more of companions, at least that’s how I think Brian Fargo, Kevin Hill and the guys at Obsidian view it.